Posted on 08/27/2025 6:14:12 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Explanation: That yellow spot -- what is it? It's a young planet outside our Solar System. The featured image from the Very Large Telescope in Chile surprisingly captures a distant scene much like our own Solar System's birth, some 4.5 billion years ago. Although we can't look into the past and see Earth's formation directly, telescopes let us watch similar processes unfolding around distant stars. At the center of this frame lies a young Sun-like star, hidden behind a coronagraph that blocks its bright glare. Surrounding the star is a bright, dusty protoplanetary disk -- the raw material of planets. Gaps and concentric rings mark where a newborn world is gathering gas and dust under its gravity, clearing the way as it orbits the star. Although astronomers have imaged disk-embedded planets before, this is the first-ever observation of an exoplanet actively carving a gap within a disk -- the earliest direct glimpse of planetary sculpting in action.
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God created everything.
Amazing picture. When I was a kid, no one really knew how planets formed. There was a theory that the planets of our solar system were ripped out of the sun by the gravitational tug of a close-passing star. Today, we know that planets are common, and they form when they sweep away leftover material from the star’s debris disk, until they dominate their respective orbits (Nebular theory). We can see it happening with modern telescopes, but this is the best one I’ve seen so far.
Awesome shot.
That is amazing.
Interesting!
That looks like the floater in my eye.
He’s still workin’ it too.
(G-D is Light, so says the Good Book. Kinda Explains Everything.)
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